1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a virtual clothing modeling apparatus, and method implementable on a computer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Patent Application Publication (KOKAI) JP-A-9-44556 and Japanese Patent No. P3314704 disclose virtual clothing modeling apparatuses which form clothing images by using figure data (height, weight, contour, etc.) of the person trying on clothing as obtained from images of the person, and then forming images which simulate how the person will actually appear when wearing the clothing. These methods obtain the figure data of the person to simulate the figure when wearing the clothing, but the methods are not capable of reflecting, on the clothes, the motion and posture of the person. Therefore, these methods cannot generate a dynamic image sequence of the person wearing clothes as they assume various poses.
J. Hoshino et al., “Building Virtual Fashion Simulator by Merging CG and Humans in Video Sequences”, IPSJ Journal, Vol. 42, No. 5, pp. 1182-1193, 2001 discloses a method of calculating differences between a previous posture and the present posture from motion data of the image, and estimates the present posture by adding the differences to the past posture. According to this method, differences are added up successively and, hence, errors in the estimation of changes are accumulated. Therefore, the estimate fails when done over a long period of time.
As described above, conventional methods are not capable of reflecting, on the clothes, the motion (posture) of a person who is trying on the clothes. Methods which attempt to reflect changes in posture are not capable of estimating the posture over a long period of time.